As a founder member of Mystery Women in 1997, promoting Crime Fiction has always been my passion.
Following the closure of Mystery Women, a new group was formed on 30th January 2012 promoting crime fiction.
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Friday, 30 December 2016

Published by
Mulholland Books, 28 July 2016. ISBN: 978-1-473-60833-7(HB)

One of the conventions of popular fiction in any genre is a character
with whom the reader can connect: either someone to root for and want to
succeed, or alternatively a rotter we love to hate and are glad to see come a
cropper.

The latter is not unusual in
a psychological thriller, and Paul Morris, protagonist of this artfully pitched
example, falls firmly into that camp right from the opening chapter. His
skilfully pitched first-person voice marks him out as pretentious,
self-regarding and self-pitying, an unapologetic womanizer and an adept
scrounger; these and other flaws suggest from the outset that he is riding for
a fall.

But that doesn’t stop Sabine
Durrant from lulling the reader into a sense of Paul’s impermeability: his
talent for taking people in and (metaphorically) getting away with murder
percolates three-quarters of the narrative. Broke and about to be homeless, he
worms his way into the home, bed and life of human rights lawyer Alice, his
machinations culminating in an invitation to join her group of friends on their
annual holiday in Greece. And that’s where (minor spoiler alert!) it all starts
to go horribly wrong...

Not that that should be
unexpected; it is a thriller, after all. And not at first; for quite a few
chapters, we could be observing an ordinary, scratchy family holiday, if it
wasn’t for a ten-year-old murder and a more recent rape lurking in the background.
And if Paul is dislikeable, Andrew, another member of the holiday party, is
even more so. Add in a clutch of teenage kids of varying degrees of
obnoxiousness; and the handful of other characters, equally well drawn and
adroitly placed for the best effect, don’t exactly set out to win the reader’s
sympathy. Only Alice herself and Tina are people we can warm to – and the fact
that I never wanted to stop reading about them all showed me that this talented
author knows exactly what she’s doing.

All of the above, plus a
tense build-up with plenty of elliptical clues, a superbly drawn background on
the Greek island (and also back home in middle-class London at first) and a
satisfyingly oblique ending that leaves you wondering: what more does a fan of
psychological thrillers need? Lie With Me was the first novel of Sabine
Durrant’s I had read; I’ll certainly be looking for more of her work.

------

Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Sabine Durrantis a journalist and the author of the best-selling Having it and Eating It and the Connie
Pickles series of children's books. Her first psychological suspense novel, Under Your Skin, was published by Hodder
in the UK and Simon & Schuster in the US in 2014. Her second, Remember Me This Way, was also published
by Hodder in the UK and Simon & Schuster in the US in 2015. Both novels
have been translated into more than 15 languages. Her third novel, Lie With Me, comes out in hardcover in
Summer 2016.Sabine has written for the
Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph. She lives in south
London with her partner, the writer Giles Smith, and their three children.

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen,
and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but
never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher
for a few years, and is proud to have launched several careers which are now
burgeoning. She lives on the edge of rural Derbyshire in a house groaning with
books, about half of them crime fiction.

Aaron Falk returns to the birthplace from which he was hounded twenty
years earlier, to attend the funeral of his childhood friend.

Luke, the friend, has apparently
murdered his wife and son and committed suicide. But Aaron doesn’t quite buy
it, and nor do Luke’s parents, or the local cop. Aaron reluctantly lets himself
become involved in a semi-official investigation, which generates bad memories
and bad blood, but makes him even more dubious about the murder-suicide
verdict.

That’s the premise behind
this highly assured, award-winning debut by an Australian journalist. It’s
well-crafted, carefully paced and intricate, with clues subtly placed and one
of the best pieces of misdirection I’ve encountered in a crime novel for a long
time.

And that’s not all. Jane
Harper has also recreated the tense, oppressive atmosphere of a small
Australian town in trouble with the kind of skill many far more experienced
novelists fail to exhibit. The book’s title refers to the fact that the
bushland farming community has had no rain for two years; the temperature
regularly hits 40 degrees centigrade and the risk of life-changing wildfires is
ever-present. Tempers are stretched and farms are failing, and under the
circumstances murder and suicide become all too possible.

Characters good and not so
good are never less than human: damaged rather than intrinsically evil, flawed
even when they’re clearly innocent and even the minor players are rounded and
vividly drawn. Raco, the local cop, has a great deal more insight than many in
similar jobs. Aaron, now a fraud detective, has skills that prove unexpectedly
useful, but finds himself obsessed by the incident decades earlier which resulted
in him and his father fleeing to the city.

Almost everyone has a secret,
as befits the best crime novels, and some prove more surprising than others. In
fact, it’s a story full of surprises, and also well-constructed and well
written, either from good research or from sound knowledge of the world the
characters inhabit.

On this showing, Jane Harper
is a writer to watch. She richly deserves the acclaim The Dry has
attracted.

------

Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Jane Harper was born in Manchester in the UK, and moved to
Australia with her family at age eight. She spent six years in Boronia,
Victoria, and during that time gained Australian citizenship. Returning to the
UK with her family as a teenager, she lived in Hampshire before studying
English and History at the University of Kent in Canterbury. On graduating, she
completed a journalism entry qualification and got her first reporting job as a
trainee on the Darlington & Stockton Times in County Durham. Jane
worked for several years as a senior news journalist for the Hull Daily
Mail, before moving back to Australia in 2008. She worked first on the Geelong
Advertiser, and in 2011 took up a role with the Herald Sun in
Melbourne. In 2014, Jane submitted a short story which was one of 12 chosen for
the Big Issue's annual Fiction Edition. That inspired her to pursue
creative writing more seriously, and that year she applied for the Curtis Brown
Creative online 12-week novel writing course. She was accepted with a
submission for the book that would become The Dry and wrote the first
full draft during the three-month course. Jane lives in St Kilda with her
husband and daughter.

http://janeharper.com.au

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen,
and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but
never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher
for a few years, and is proud to have launched several careers which are now
burgeoning. She lives on the edge of rural Derbyshire in a house groaning with
books, about half of them crime fiction.

Milan 1938 and in the fashion house of Christiana
O’Brian the showing of the season’s latest designs is in full swing. But the
unexpected appearance of someone that Christiana doesn’t want to see causes her
to rush out of the showing. That someone is a woman called Anna Sage, sister of
Christiana’s ex-husband Russell Sage, business tycoon and former bank robber
now freed from prison, Russell Sage. Is Russell himself now in Milan? Does he
suspect Anna of having betrayed him to the Chicago police? But when the
distraught Christiana seeks refuge in her bedroom, there is a corpse on her
bed. It is her employee, the youthful Valerio, and he has been strangled. Detective
Inspector De Vincenzi of the Milan Police is the investigator and he needs all
his subtle intellect and intuitive powers to unravel the mystery. In the end he
does so and confronts the main participants – Christiana herself, Anna Sage, Madam
Dolores Firmino the company’s artistic director, Prospero O’Lary the company
secretary, Marta the company’s director. Some of them are lying, but only one
is the murderer.

For
me, the main interest of this book arises from the author’s position as,
according to the informational material accompanying the text, the first native
Italian mystery writer, although crime fiction had been extremely popular in
Italy for some years and the publisher Mondadori had a full list of British and
American titles in his giallo list. And
much in The Three Orchids is
reminiscent of classic Agatha Christie, in particular the final confrontation
scene. Tragically, De Angelis fell foul of the Fascist regime of Mussolini
which was critical of anything that could be implied as criticism of the regime,
was imprisoned and on his release was beaten up by fascist thugs and later died
of his injuries. But I wish could be more enthusiastic about the book itself, some
of the author’s observations would raise eyebrows today: ‘Lying and distraction
come easily to women; their deviousness is automatic’; ‘How could one
distinguish truth from falsehood in a woman’s statements, and how could one
find logic in her words and actions?’ ‘Science and statistics tell us that it
is much more common to find criminal brilliance in women than in men.’ Not the
sort of nonsense that the great Agatha would have uttered. Nor the great
Margery or the great Dorothy L. Nonetheless The
Three Orchids is of considerable historic importance.

------

Reviewer: Radmila
May

Augusto De Angelis (1888-1944) was a Italian novelist and journalist,
most famous for his series of detective novels featuring Commissario Carlo De
Vincenzi. His cultured protagonist was enormously popular in Italy, but the
Fascist government of the time considered him an enemy, and during the Second
World War he was imprisoned by the authorities. Shortly after his release he
was beaten up by a Fascist activist and died from his injuries. The Murdered
Banker and The Hotel of the Three Roses are also available from
Pushkin Press.

Radmila Maywas
born in the U.S. but has lived in the U.K. since she was seven apart from seven
years in The Hague. She read law at university but did not go into practice.
Instead she worked for many years for a firm of law publishers and still does
occasional work for them including taking part in a substantial revision and
updating of her late husband’s legal practitioners’ work on Criminal Evidence
published late 2015. She has also contributed short stories with a distinctly
criminal flavour to two of the Oxford Stories anthologies published by Oxpens
Press – a third story is to be published shortly in another Oxford Stories
anthology – and is now concentrating on her own writing.

Wednesday, 28 December 2016

Chef Maurice is head chef and owner of Le Cochon
Rouge, the finest (and only) restaurant in the Cotswold village of
Beakley.Following an unfortunate
incident in which a bottle of rather fine Barolo became an ingredient in what
was agreed to have been a splendid red wine jus, it has been decided to provide
some staff training and so the Cochon Rouge Wine Appreciation Society was
established.Chef Maurice’s love of food
and drink is boundless and so, when renowned wine collector Sir William
Burton-Trent turns up to the Society’s first meeting and invites him to a
dinner and wine tasting the following evening, he is delighted.

With
his friend, food critic Arthur Wordington-Smythe, Chef Maurice makes the snowy
journey to Sir William’s home, where they chat with their fellow guests,
unaware that in a short time they will find themselves involved in a classic
locked room mystery.Their host is found
dead in his own wine cellar.Chef
Maurice is no stranger to murder and he, Arthur, and his colleagues at the Cochon
Rouge, together with the local Police Constable Lucy (will she and Patrick, the
sous-chef, ever get together?) use smart logic and a kipper sandwich to solve
the fine wine mystery in fine style.

This
book is the second in what is developing into a delightful series.It is a cozy with Golden Age trimmings; the
plotting is deft, the characters are attractive, and the writing has a light
touch – altogether a entertaining read.

------

Reviewer:Jo Hesslewood

Other
books by the author:Chef Maurice and a Spot of Truffle;Chef
Maurice and the Bunny-Boiler Bake

J.A. Lang is
the author of the Chef Maurice Mysteries, set in the fictional Cotswold village
of Beakley, conveniently located within driving distance of her home in Oxford,
England. She lives with her husband, an excessive number of cookbooks, and a
sourdough starter named Bob.When not at her writing desk, she enjoys cooking,
eating, travelling to places with good food, drinking good wine, and thinking
about her next meal. (Please note that any similarities between J.A. Lang and
her main character, Chef Maurice, are purely coincidental.)

Jo Hesslewood. Crime
fiction has been my favourite reading material since as a teenager I first
spotted Agatha Christie on the library bookshelves.For twenty-five years the commute to and from
London provided plenty of reading time.I am fortunate to live in Cambridge, where my local crime fiction book
club, Crimecrackers, meets at Heffers Bookshop .I enjoy attending crime fiction events and
currently organise events for the Margery Allingham Society.

About Me

From an early age I have been a lover of crime fiction. Discovering like minded people at my first crime conference at St Hilda’s Oxford in 1997, I was delighted when asked to join a new group for the promotion of female crime writers. In 1998 I took over the running of the group, which I did for the next thirteen years.
During that time I organised countless events promoting crime writers and in particular new writers. But apart from the sheer joy of reading, ‘I actually love books, not just the writing, the plot or the characters, but the sheer joy of holding a book has never abated for me. The greatest gift of my life has been the ability to read'.